Be It Resolved

I read the funnies every morning. I may not read anything else, but the Dallas Morning News has 2.5 pages of comics during the week (more on Sunday) and I read each and every one. Day before yesterday, Garfield the cat was making his new year’s resolutions. The first was to lose weight. The second was to exercise every day. The third was to quit lying so much.

Unless something drastic happens in the next, few, final hours of the year, I’ll have kept my resolution to stay out of the hospital / surgery suite for a year. This is the first resolution I’ve managed to keep, I think, ever.

After I had hip replacement surgery in 2008, I told my husband I was swearing off surgery — that I would just learn to live with whatever was wrong with me. It wasn’t that the hip surgery was bad — it wasn’t. It’s just that it had been the latest in a long series of surgeries and I was tired of always recuperating. That resolution didn’t last long. About six months later I had shoulder replacement surgery, followed about a year later with two more shoulder surgeries, one for a rotator cuff tear and the second a few months later for remedial surgery on the shoulder replacement. You can understand my 2011 commitment to stay away from surgeons.

As I look toward 2012 I am at a quandary about what resolution(s) I should try to make for the year. I have little hope that this will be a surgery-free year. And yes, like a lot of us, I need to eat less and exercise more, but I’ve made (and broken) that resolution more times than I care to count. I can’t resolve to be better to myself because if I were any better to me, I’d be a spoiled brat.

But what I can resolve to do is be more mindful of my health. I will remind myself that my health doesn’t come second to career or my long to-do list; that sleep is more important than watching that late-night television show; that even a little bit of exercise is better than none; and that, even with replacement parts, this is the only body I’ll have in this lifetime, so I should take care of it.

(Of course, if there is chocolate involved, all bets are off!)

I hope your resolutions will bless you and yours with health and prosperity in 2012. Thanks for checking in and have a happy new year.